


New Morning

by mothi



Category: Bob Dylan (Musician), The Beatles (Band)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-07
Updated: 2018-08-07
Packaged: 2019-06-23 07:23:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15601248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mothi/pseuds/mothi
Summary: It felt strange, being in Bob’s house.





	New Morning

**Author's Note:**

> This is set in 1977, the year both Bob and George were divorced from their wives and George reportedly spent quite a bit of time with Bob in America afterwards.

It felt strange, being in Bob’s house. Of course, he had been in his house before—the house before this one, at least—but there had been company the last time he visited. A rough trickle of guests appearing as black shapes in the yellow puddle of light on the porch as the sunset bled from the sky and vanishing before the kettle had boiled in the morning, the only evidence of their presence being the guitars left in odd places or the echoes of songs sung in the early hours that still lingered come the dawn.

This time the house was empty but for the two of them.

It took a while to get used to. The quiet, most of all. The memories of the last few months remained in his mind as nothing more than a cacophony of sound: shouting, tears, phone conversations that rattled into silence halfway through a broken word. The rest he had filtered out. What had happened remained in letters and documents and Pattie’s shattered eyes, in spiky black words and his own signature scrawled countless times over countless pages. Lost apologies.

Now he awoke, in a room at the top of the house with green floral curtains, and lay in the silence with his duvet pulled up to his chin and a single beam of dusty sunlight pooling on the side of his face and the sound outside of the trees and the birds and the muffled clatter of Bob in the kitchen making coffee. It was September already. Nights drawing in, cold starting to creep into his bones as he sat outside in the evenings, but the mornings still held the fragile vitality of summer. He would go downstairs in the mornings before he had changed out of his pyjamas, duck out through the low wooden door to the garden, and in the cool green dawn he would walk barefoot in the wet grass and look out over the trees, listening to the dawn chorus until his feet were soaked with dew and he left wet footprints on Bob’s oak floors.

He liked Bob because he didn’t say much. In fact, he liked Bob for a lot of reasons, but that was a significant one. Every day, once the sun had fully risen and he had come back in from the garden, he would find Bob at the scrubbed wooden table with a pot of coffee and two mugs, reading the paper with his hair standing on end and his eyelids heavy with the vestiges of sleep. Bob would glance up from the article he was reading—local produce column, usually—and give a brief smile before turning back to the paper. Breakfast would proceed in the same way: an almost silent affair, though not silent in the way his breakfasts with Pattie had been. Those meals had been the silence in between each tick of a clock, harsh and white and frozen iron cold, ready to splinter at a gasp. These mornings with Bob were a lifetime away from that half-remembered desolation. This silence was yellow-green leaves in sunlight and cleared throats, the soft thud of ceramic on wood, the crinkling of the eyes before a smile.

He hadn’t intended to stay this long. He certainly hadn’t intended to stay long enough that a very clear routine had formed. A few days at most, he had said back home, to whoever was there to listen—just enough to clear my head. I need to get away from all this. I need to be with someone who understands.

At some point, once they had finished the coffee and Bob had finished the paper and the sunlight had strengthened from early-morning blue to pale green to yellow, Bob would stand up and stretch and run his hands through his hair before wandering away upstairs to do whatever he did once they had breakfasted. It was impossible to predict how long he would be: some days he could be up and down within ten minutes, others it would be hours before he came down again, although an educated guess could be made based on how open his eyes had been at the breakfast table. Somehow it was almost noisier when he had gone, in the absence of the creak of floorboards and the occasional suspended fragment of a song that had trailed away before he could put his finger on it. Just the birds, and the trees, and the distant sound of a car engine every so often—a human sound in this green, voiceless haven.

The days were shorter now than they had been even since he had arrived, and he spent them mostly inside, reading, playing guitar, talking. Sometimes he cooked, or listened to old records that Bob had lying around the house in various unlikely places. He found Little Richard in the cupboard under the sink and Buddy Holly down the back of the sofa, and _Blood on the Tracks_ , still in its paper packaging with the seal unbroken, under the bed in his room. One of his own, very worn, on top of the record player.

Every so often he would go out, to the nearby town for the farmer’s market or to walk in the woods. That was one of the benefits of being here rather than at home: less Americans recognised him with a moustache than Brits did, especially if he wore unremarkable clothes and tried to appear as though he belonged at a vegetable stand buying carrots with a subtly altered Liverpudlian accent. Bob said his ‘incognito voice’ made him sound like a weather reporter. He didn’t complain about the carrots, though, and they made soup together using herbs from Bob’s garden.

In the evening they sat together on the porch and looked out at the sinking sun and Bob pressed their hands gently together in the dark. He didn’t notice the cold, or the noise of the cicadas, or the soft music drifting through the open door from the record they had put on over dinner. Bob’s eyes flickered briefly in the yellow rectangle of light spilling from the kitchen window, looking straight into his, warm and soft and reassuring as the fingers threaded through his own. If he turned his head he could see the pale imprint of the moon hanging smooth in the sky. Bob’s hair a golden halo in the dying light. The sound of the trees.

**Author's Note:**

> talk to me on tumblr @sneez !


End file.
